Pressure for housing pays

Newark's landscape is dotted with neat clusters of brick townhouses that are hard to distinguish from much of the private development going up all over the city.

Those townhouses are public housing properties, among the 1,777 units built to replace what was lost when the Newark Housing Authority demolished the Columbus Homes, Kretchmer Homes and Stella Wright high-rises years ago. It is almost certain those townhomes would not have been built, certainly not in as great numbers, had it not been for a citizen group that filed a lawsuit in 1989 because replacement construction was not part of the official plan.

Last month, nearly 20 years later, the federal judge who ruled on behalf of the citizens and has been monitoring compliance said it is time to dismiss the case -- but that the court will keep an eye on public housing in Newark.

U.S. District Judge Dickinson Debevoise wisely kept the court involved in the matter of developer Tony Gomes, who was politically connected during the administration of former Newark Mayor Sharpe James and received millions in contracts to build replacement units. Gomes has an unfinished project, fenced in and vacant, along Elizabeth Avenue in the South Ward. It is badly needed low-income housing, paid for at public expense, in an area where most of the private multi-family homes now rent for $1,200 or more per unit.

The judge has given the NHA -- under new management -- until December to cut through the excuses and fumbling, get those homes open or answer to the court. It was the right ruling.

The Newark Coalition for Low-Income Housing, which filed the suit 20 years ago, the tenants who stepped forward in support, knowing they could be in for harassment from their NHA landlord, and Debevoise have fought the good fight. Their effort should not have been required, however, since a federal law says the NHA was supposed to replace lost units one for one.

Other NHA buildings, not covered by the lawsuit, have been imploded. New complexes are being built, but not one for each one destroyed, and not all of them are affordable to displaced people.

This chapter of Newark's history teaches how one community's housing decisions affect its neighbors. East Orange and Irvington can attest to the housing stresses they suffered because urban renewal in Newark amounted to population dispersal.

Could more have been done? Definitely. A lot less would have been done had it not been for the coalition's lawsuit.